Welcome to Week 2 of our 2018 SYNC season! This week’s pair of audiobooks includes a nonfiction and author-narrated book that will take you places you might find beyond imagination, and a novel, also performed by the author, about which we’re sure you’ve heard friends enthusing.

THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY, written and read by Luis Alberto Urrea for Hachette Audio, provides an investigative report on conditions and events that occurred when 26 people attempted to cross the border from Mexico to the U.S. at a place long known both for its natural dangers and as an indigenous trail now bifurcated by a political boundary. Urrea’s writing and his reading reflect finely polished words, words that nonetheless point out the harrowing and often deadly results arising from the choice to move north in spite of inhospitable climates both geophysical and geopolitical. Urrea won the Lannan Literary Award for this book, which was also a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

SOLO, by Kwame Alexander and Mary Rand Hess, is paired with this. Read by Kwame Alexander for Blink, with music by Randy Preston, this novel in verse takes us along when teenaged Blade decides the only way to become satisfied with his life is to leave his home behind and travel to Ghana. Both the novel and the audiobook are suffused with music, Blade’s passion. Listeners can also enjoy music from Randy Preston that inspired the author as he created and wrote about this character.

Remember that you can save your SYNC audiobook downloads forever once you retrieve them each week. This week’s pair makes great listening now and also for later in the summer when the road might be your own home for a while.